Marijuana use among high school eighth, 10th, and 12th graders remained steady over a five-year period, with 6.5%, 14.8%, and 21.3%, respectively, admitting to smoking marijuana within the past month. A full 6% of high school seniors admit to smoking marijuana daily. Perhaps most surprising, just 31.9% of today’s students view occasional marijuana smoking as harmful compared to 78.6% in 1991. Data source: University of Michigan via NIDA. To sum up MTF’s findings: High school seniors now smoke marijuana daily more often than they do cigarettes. While cigarettes are a vice of their own with proven adverse lung and cardiovascular effects, the jury on marijuana’s safety profile is still out. Even more so, this demonstrates one of regulators’ biggest fears: that minors will be able to get their hands on a drug that, even if legalized, would still likely be illegal for anyone to possess under the age of 21. The other concern here is a previously conducted study from researchers at Northwestern University on adolescent marijuana users. The findings showed that adolescents who began using marijuana daily at age 16 or 17 for a period of three years had an oddly shaped hippocampus, which was accompanied by an average long-term memory test score that was 18% lower than the young adults who’d never used marijuana before. Safety is an issue that won’t easily be resolved To be clear, the MTF study isn’t suggestive that marijuana use is exploding higher despite marijuana being viewed more favorably by adolescents.